narrate an audiobook

For anyone who only has written material to read, the switch to writing that needs to be spoken can be a minefield and that’s mostly because the novice writer imagines they’re the same.

I’m talking about a fictional story to be told and on the surface it should be the same; after all, many great novels have been made into audiobooks. But these are rarely great audiobooks because they weren’t written specifically for that medium.

The strength of the printed story as with the audio reproduction is that they allow the imagination to come into play, since although a character is described in a book, his image in our mind will be ours. Similarly, with an audio playback, a character may appear, but unless another character describes it, we have no idea what it looks like, and the listener’s imagination must fill in the blanks.

But with a work of fiction that is going to be narrated by a single voice, you can’t do a direct narration because there are too many clues missing. No matter how skilled the actor is as a storyteller, there is still the potential for confusion to arise in differentiating the characters.

So where the printed page can read –

“I’m going home now, I’m tired.”

“Really? I thought you looked pretty lively.”

The reader knows that this is a conversation between two people because of the punctuation marks, but a listener does not, and that requires the insertion of the ubiquitous ‘he said’, ‘she said’ to a degree that would not be acceptable to a reader, but it is necessary for a listener.

If sound effects and background music are added that could drain or mute the narrator’s voice, the effect can be even more confusing.

If this seems trivial to the writer, he misses the point. If you are going to tell the story, you have to tell it well.

This is important due to the rise of audiobooks, especially Amazon’s Audible imprint. Amazon is rarely wrong and is investing heavily in promoting Audible, creating a great opportunity for the freelance writer. But simply taking your masterpiece and handing it over to a storyteller is doing an injustice. It deserves to be rewritten with the listener in mind rather than the reader and there is another lesson to be learned here about brevity. With a printed page, a dull passage can easily be skipped over, or pages can be flipped forward until the reader re-engages with the story, but this is impossible with an audiobook because a fast-forward button on your MP3 player it still leaves you guessing where. to restart your listening.

So cut it out, cut the boring, no matter how delicious your prose is. Just listening to a story, rather than reading it or sitting in front of a screen, means the listener is most likely doing something else at the same time. If you bore them, they’ll hit the stop button before heading to Amazon for a refund.

This is, relatively speaking, a new medium, and even an expert playwright, experienced in writing for radio, can find himself caught up in the whims of a narrated text. Storytellers cost money just like study time, so it’s best to narrate yourself to start with and let a friend or colleague comment on your efforts before you incur any expense. If they understand every word and love it, you’ve done well and hiring a professional storyteller is justified. But most likely there are flaws and these need to be fixed before turning pro.

This is not an easy option because narrating a 60,000 word novel is going to stretch to over five and a half hours of audio at an average reading speed of 180 words per minute. But reading it aloud has additional benefits, as it can help the editing process and catch errors more easily than reading silently from the page or screen, so I would recommend recording your novel chapter by chapter so it doesn’t become a mess. too onerous task. in one session.

In conclusion, remember this. Listening to it is very different from reading it.